Staccato (2025)

Me + Her

Creating a universe between two small pieces of Cardboard. When Jack and Jill of Cardboard City are separated by Jill's torrid illness, Jack must think outside the box to assure they will be together again.

Drums West

This newly rediscovered short was created in Jim's home studio in Bethesda, MD around 1961. It is one of several experimental shorts inspired by the music of jazz great Chico Hamilton. At the end, in footage probably shot by Jerry Juhl, Jim demonstrates his working method.

You're Not Real Pretty but You're Mine...

"Mouris’s film, YOU’RE NOT REAL PRETTY BUT YOU’RE MINE…, built upon the strongest elements of QUICK DREAM, and added a pop music soundtrack. Mouris says, “I shot another 100 foot roll on classmate Jerry Strawbridge’s home animation stand, and edited that into the best sequences from QUICK DREAM. The whole film was a tongue-in-cheek series of odd couples/couplings, which the title suggested. The FRANK FILM photo collage animation evolved here.” - Yale

Son of the White Mare

A horse goddess gives birth to three powerful brothers who set out into the Underworld to save three princesses from three evil dragons and reclaim their ancestors' lost kingdom.

Bunnyhood

What could possibly be more important than feeding your daughter?

Dam$els of Luxury

Amanda's stoner slumber party is put to a halt when one of her guests is nowhere to be found.

Gemini

Sarah and her two cats go about their separate lives. The cats have strange dreams about their desires, and Sarah develops an unshakable paranoia that something is wrong with them. Sarah's paranoia bleeds into her social life, and her two cats have their dreams come true.

reMemBer2.human

In an indeterminate future, forbidden memories challenge a database containing all human memories. An experimental cinematic search between past and future, fiction and fact, Prishtina and Tirana. The future, a glitch.

Mothlight

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.

Eye Myth

After the title, a white screen gives way to a series of frames suggestive of abstract art, usually with one or two colors dominating and rapid change in the images. Two figures emerge from this jungle of color: the first, a shirtless man, appears twice, coming into focus, then disappearing behind the bursts and patterns of color, then reappearing; the second figure appears later, in the right foreground. This figure suggests someone older, someone of substance. The myth? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Maalbeek

Sabine is looking for a missing image: a day that has left its mark forever and that everyone remembers but her. But maybe this absence is what allows her to move on with her life?

LAND

LAND is a fluid series of formal land animation experiments based upon the imprint of landscapes in various locations and intuitive interpretations of those movements. Shot in New York, Thimble Islands Bear Island, Connecticut, Armstrong Redwoods, Sonoma County, California, Hastings, England. note* (part of the EYE Filmmuseum Permanent Collection)

Trade Tattoo

Trade Tattoo went even further than Rainbow Dance in its manipulation of the Gasparcolor process. The original black and white footage consisted of outtakes from GPO Film Unit documentaries such as Night Mail. Lye transformed this footage in what has been described as the most intricate job of film printing and color grading ever attempted. Animated words and patterns combine with the live-action footage to create images as complex and multi-layered as a Cubist painting. Music was provided by the Cuban Lecuona Band. With its dynamic rhythms, the film seeks (in Lye’s words) to convey “a romanticism about the work of the everyday in all walks of life."

House

An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.

A Fugue

A space occupies it, awaiting to be unlocked by a freeing action or notion. What lies ahead is its determination.

Fuji

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .

Sunstone

Experimental computer animation from pioneering artist Ed Emshwiller.

The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Animated work detailing the unrequited love that a line has for a dot, and the heartbreak that results due to the dot's feelings for a lively squiggle.

Stellar

This is a hand-painted film which has been photographically step-printed to achieve various effects of brief fades and fluidity-of-motion, and makes partial use of painted frames in repetition (for "close-up" of textures). The tone of the film is primarily dark blue, and the paint is composed (and rephotographed microscopically) to suggest galactic forms in a space of stars.

sfumato

Derived from an installation, an asymmetrical orchestration of "motion paintings" pushing the limits of abstraction in the digital age.

Fluids

16mm color work by Stan Vanderbeek that takes his work away from the cutups and the commentary and lands him in the psychedelic and abstract. Opticals, repetitions, camera moves and zooms are what make up the bulk of this exploration into fluids. The results bridge that realm between hangout art piece and intersteller stoner trip.

Sausage City

Sausage City illustrates Beckett's additive cycle process. Constantly evolving rectangular shapes provide a foundation for an environment inhabited by mutating blobs - or sausages. Sounds and shapes create a moving space that teeters on the edge between control and chaos. The ending is somewhat mystifying, pulling us out of the surreal environment and revealing its origins. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

MATIERICA

One might think that beautiful pictures, a compelling story, and brilliant movement are the three essential elements of a good animated film. The word "anima" from which animation is derived, as we all know, means "to breathe life into". And "life" means "limited time" and that there could be an approach that does not include any of the aforementioned "three elements". The result of several years of exploring new methods was an "animated film" that eschews the so-called "animated" structure. This film aims to visualize "shifting consciousness" through a method of filming in which approximately 5,000 pencil drawings are constantly overlapped"

Catgot

A colourful "fountain performance".

Mamori

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

Drux Flux

Partly figurative, partly abstract, Drux Flux is an animation film of fast-flowing images showing modern people crushed by industry. Inspired by One-Dimensional Man by the philosopher Herbert Marcus…

Generation

A brief journey through the human experience as seen by the eyes of an Artificial Intelligence.

Shearing Animation

An abstract animated film inspired by the work of jazz musician Chico Hamilton.